Monday, March 27, 2006

The embarrassing revelation that the former KGB agent may have cheated and lied about his qualifications follows a long search by US scholars for evidence of the President's academic prowess. A copy of the thesis was eventually found in the electronic files of a Moscow technical library.

According to Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Mr Putin's work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.